Saturday, July 13, 2013

SAR #13194

They say peak oil is dead. Right, you seen the price of WTI lately?

Recovered: JPMorgan reports that its earnings grew 31% Q/Q. Not bad for pushing paper, foreclosing on widows and scamming your customers – not to mention that Libor thingy.

Promises, Promises: Remember all that natural gas we're getting by poisoning the drinking water in Pennsylvania and so on? Remember how it was going to lower CO2 emissions from power plants? Well, the fracked wells have impressive decline rates and coal's part of US power generation has crept up from 35.4 % to 39.5% in the first 4 months of 2013.

Explicate: "If there is a time we want to see higher inflation, this is one of them.” Why?

Cheat Sheet: Keep in mind that the much touted flush of shale oil production is not going to last and will fade rapidly due to the 80% to 90% first year decline rate. Keeping production up, much less growing, will require ever more wells drilled in ever less productive shales at ever higher costs. It's not quite peak oil, but it might be Peak Economics.

Something Else To Worry About: Iowa's Supreme Court has ruled that it is legal to fire someone for being too “attractive” - especially if your wife is insecure and you are a known letch. The court is all male.

Victory: One way to keep Walmart from colonizing your town is to require that they pay their peons a living wage, even though it will be “the death of free enterprise”. Worked for DC.

Lies, Math& Brother Hoods: The Koch brothers flooded Georgia with warnings that requiring Southern Co. (part of Georgia Power) to buy more solar energy will drive energy prices up 40% or more. Quite how doubling the amount of solar power from 1% to 2% of the company's output would drive up prices that much is a mystery. And academic, too, because the Koch brothers lost and the measure passed.

Bigger Is Better, Not: Global climate change models indicate that there will be a 40% increase, globally, in category 3 and higher hurricanes/tropical cyclones in the coming decades. There is pretty close to a 99% chance this 40% increase will occur.

A Mouthful: California will soon have to  force feed more than 12,000 prisoners ;  temporary jobs, one supposes, unlike Guantanamo.

The Parting Shot:

130713

Quaker rouge. Verbascum thapsus.

3 comments:

mistah charley, ph.d. said...

i suppose its my libertarian tendencies coming out, for which i apologize if necessary - but

a)why force feed prisoners?

b)if a dentist doesn't want to have a particular dental assistant work for him in his office, for personal reasons - why should the state step in?

yes, government intervention prevents one harm here, but in my opinion it causes another

ymmv

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

mcpd: Well, I've not heard of a suggestion that thye force feed tens of thousands of prisoners - it was supposed to be a "compare/contrast" wry comment, as was the 'temporary' nature of such a job.

Why, though, should there be a difference between working for a one-man shop (the dentist) and, say, a school system or a large factory? Either there there are some restraints on an employer or there are not - the number of employees should not be a factor, nor the number of bosses. Discrimination - hire/fire based on whim - is pretty much discrimination.

ckm

Anonymous said...

Charles,

Chairman Ben wants inflation to counter the current deflation. (Despite the headlines we are in a deflation, not an inflation. See a recent post by Ilargi at The Automatic Earth.) In a deflation, people are afraid to spend because they are worried their future income will go down, and because they think their money will be worth more later. In an inflation, people want to spend because their money will be worth less later. The FED wants people to spend. Hence the desire for inflation.

I think the QE attempt to create inflation would have worked splendidly in 1932. Today's contraction is caused by increased energy costs. I don't see how QE can help that situation.

MJR